Archive

Quotes

Let him who desires peace prepare for war.

—Vegetius, c. 385

It is a certain sign of a wise government and proceeding, when it can hold men’s hearts by hopes, when it cannot by satisfaction.

—Francis Bacon, 1625

Envy is the basis of democracy.

—Bertrand Russell, 1930

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

—Shimon Peres, 1995

Politics is the art of the possible.

—Otto von Bismarck, 1867

Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.

—Immanuel Kant, 1784

I shall be an autocrat: that’s my trade. And the good Lord will forgive me: that’s his.

—Catherine the Great, c. 1796

If you must take care that your opinions do not differ in the least from those of the person with whom you are talking, you might just as well be alone.

—Yoshida Kenko, c. 1330

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.

—Paul Valéry, 1943

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham.

—Frederick Douglass, 1855

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

—Martin Luther King Jr., c. 1967

Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.

—John Wilkes Booth, 1865

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

—Mario Cuomo, 1985